In a known betting shop system, a customer wishing to place a bet fills out his own betting slip. The slip is in two pans, a top copy and a bottom copy. Anything written on the top copy is copied onto the bottom copy by a known chemical process. The details written on the slip relate to the place and time of the race, the name of the horse or dog selected, and the amount of the stake. The customer has a choice of starting price or board price odds. Starting price odds are the odds prevailing at the start of the race itself. Board price odds are the odds that prevail at the time of the bet. If a customer asks for a board price, the till operator usually verifies the odds by referring to continually updated information supplied to the betting shop. Once the odds have been verified, they are written on the slip by the till operator, and highlighted by, for example, the till operator putting a red ring around the odds. The till operator then takes the stake money from the customer, puts the slip in a print mechanism of the till and enters the stake on the till, whereupon the stake value and a unique serial number are printed on the top and bottom copies of the slip. The till operator then puts the stake money in the till drawer, removes the slip from the till print mechanism, parts the two halves of the slip, gives the bottom copy to the customer and feeds the top copy through a camera mechanism where a photograph is taken, the camera mechanism containing a digital clock which is photographed along with the betting slip to establish the time the bet was taken. The photograph serves as a permanent record of the details of the bet, including the board price if taken, and the time the bet was taken.
The till operator retrieves the top copies of the slips from the camera mechanism and passes them to the settler.
The function of the settler is to scrutinise the bets in order to compute the value of winning bets. The settler enters the value of a win onto the top copy of the slip and passes it to the payout operator. Losing slips are put to one side.
When a customer presents the bottom copy of a winning bet to the payout operator, the two parts of the slip are scrutinised to see that no alterations have been made. If all is correct, the payout operator gives the customer the amount written on the top copy of the slip by the settler, attaches the two pans of the slip together, and passes them to the settler.
The camera record and winning and losing slips are taken to Head Office from time to time, where they are inspected in an attempt to detect if any cheating is occurring, either by a customer and/or by betting shop personnel.
A problem with known betting shop systems is that if a board price is requested, it must be manually applied to the betting slip. As the odds vary over a period of time, errors may be made by the operator, and the wrong odds may be applied.
A second problem is that it is not easy to go back and check that the odds applied to the slip were correct at the time the bet was taken, since the photographic record that is taken is not immediately and conveniently available, and this record has to be checked against a master record of the day's events.
A third problem is that the verification of a winning bet by the payout person is time consuming.
A fourth problem is that the settler calculates the value of winning bets manually and can make mistakes. Generally customers inform the shop staff of underpays but not overpays, and consequently the shop's profitability is reduced.
A fifth problem is that, if the bet is a multiple bet having several selections in the form of doubles, trebles and accumulators, the settler has to handle the bet several times, thus increasing the possibility of error.
A sixth problem is that the security checking of camera records against slips can only be done when the film and bets have been collected from the shop and the film processed. This may entail a delay of three to four weeks.
A further problem is the time taken to check a winning bet against the camera records since the photograph of the bet has to be found on the film.
Australian Patent publication AU-A-458 244 discloses in detail operation of the well-known "PARIMUTUEL" betting system. This mechanised system uses a "mark sense" coupon to input a selection of possible bet data, issues a ticket on which the bet data is magnetically coded and printed on the ticket, calculates the values of winning bets on a pool-sharing basis, and pays out accordingly to winning tickets. It has no facilities for forming images of betting coupons, and indeed, the system has no use for such images.